Online payments

The global e-commerce payment gateway provider BlueSnap has developed new application programming interfaces (APIs) to help merchants increase sales as the holiday shopping season nears.

Security vendor Retail Decision Plc (ReD) is working with First Data to deter card-not-present fraud in Mexico.

As card networks develop tokens to stand in for account numbers in online and mobile commerce, they may be able to standardize the experience across all companies that handle payments, said Mike Matan, head of global network business at American Express.

Rallying its members to wipe out passwords, the Faster IDentity Online Alliance — an organization of more than 150 payments and technology businesses — released standards Dec. 9 for multi-factor e-commerce authentication.

Banks would have to upgrade their systems to accommodate faster transactions, and originating banks would pay the receiving financial institutions a fee to cover those costs, under a plan from Nacha, the industry group that sets ACH rules.

The Aschheim, Germany-based payments company will process subscriptions for the TV station's Sky Starter and Sky Film packages.

Visa and Kofax are attempting to simplify complex invoice payments in Asia by introducing technology into processes that have long been handled manually.

SignaPay, a payment processing company based in Irving, Texas, has acquired PayHub, a merchant services company in San Rafael, Calif.

Alipay, the payments affiliate of Alibaba, leads the market for online third-party payment services in China, according to a recent iResesarch, a Chinese market research firm.

MasterCard will soon make its digital wallet available to consumers in China.

Payments innovation normally migrates to the U.S. from Canada, which is at a more advanced stage of deployment with EMV-chip cards and other technology. But that's not the case for business-to-business payments.

For Cubic Transportation Systems, the term "NextCity" describes a city in which consumers use a single account for transit and parking while making payments through a smart card or mobile app.

Payvision has launched its global payment network in Canada through a partnership with Home Trust, a bank based in Toronto.

BlueSnap has launched a new system called ChargeLink to help businesses close sales over the phone.

Real-time payment systems must be interoperable if they are to succeed, Fiserv says. To this end, the vendor wants to enable an open network, but it faces stiff competition.

The annual Cyber Monday shopping holiday is a boon to mobile payments, but remains a significant challenge for e-commerce security.

Twitter Inc. is testing a way for users to redeem discounts through merchants' tweets, expanding its online commerce efforts.

Xoom Corp., a digital payments company based in San Francisco, has launched a mobile bill-pay service in Latin America.

BlueSnap says its partnership with First Data Corp. will result in fewer declined transactions for e-commerce merchants, thus convincing more of them to turn to the online gateway provider to support global sales.

Less than two weeks after expanding into 15 Latin American markets, online remittance provider WorldRemit has launched its services in the U.S.